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Month: April 2016

Frivolous Fridays are the Orbit bloggers’ excuse to post about fun things we care a lot about that may not necessarily have serious implications for politics or social justice. Although any day is a good day to write about our passions outside of social issues, we sometimes have a hard time giving ourselves permission to do that. This is our way of encouraging each other to take a break from serious topics and have some fun.

There’s been a lot of advice lately about what not to post on social media to avoid annoying other people, since that should obviously be your top priority going through life. I decided to helpfully condense all this advice into one article that you can keep handy.

Nope.

Don’t post any selfies. People who post selfies are self-obsessed. If you’re attractive and you post selfies, you’re probably just trying to show off and make people feel bad about themselves. If you’re unattractive and you post selfies, ew, nobody wants to see that.

…except for your profile photo. People who make their profile photo anything other than their own face are so awkward and weird. What, are you that insecure about your appearance? We all know you’re not a dog or a flower.

Don’t post photos of your partner(s). That’s so annoying. Besides, how are all your single friends going to feel?

Don’t post photos of your kid(s). Parents are sooo annoying on social media, always assuming that everyone wants to see a hundred photos of their kids. You can post one photo of each child per lifetime–preferably when they’re born and then never again.

Don’t post photos of your pets. See above.

No.

Don’t post photos of your friends. That just makes other people feel bad because they might not have as active of a social life. Besides, why are you trying to show off how popular you are? Just enjoy your time with your friends without having to broadcast it to the public.

Don’t post photos of food. Who cares about your boring dinner? Oh, that’s a five-course Italian meal you cooked yourself? What a show-off.

Definitely not.

Don’t post photos of landscapes, cityscapes, or cool things you see. Why can’t you just enjoy the moment rather than waste it on taking a photo?

Not this one either.

So, pretty much don’t post photos of anything at all.

Don’t post about your accomplishments. That makes it seem like you just want attention and affirmation for doing totally basic things like getting into medical school or having your writing accepted for publication. Yeah, yeah, we get it, you’re soooo smart and talented and perfect. No need to rub it in people’s faces. If you were really that happy about it, you wouldn’t need attention on social media.

Don’t downplay your accomplishments. Otherwise known as humblebragging. This is annoying. Just be proud of what you did and don’t act all fake and modest about it.

Actually, just don’t post positive things. That makes other people compare themselves to the unrealistic standard that you’ve set and that’s what causes mental illness. Do you want to give people mental illnesses?

Don’t post negative things either. Nobody likes a Debbie Downer. It’s unfair to force other people to deal with your problems by seeing them briefly in their newsfeed and then immediately scrolling past.

Don’t post about politics or social justice. It’s controversial and makes people upset, and besides, all you’re doing is reinforcing your own tribalism and trying to score points with other people on your side. Politics is not what Facebook is for.

Don’t post funny memes. Don’t you care about anything serious, like what’s going on in the world?

Don’t post song lyrics. I’m just going to assume they’re a passive-aggressive comment about me.

Don’t post about work. That’s so boring. Leave it at the office.

Don’t post about sex, not even with a warning. That’s disgusting. Keep it to yourself.

Don’t post about fitness. Who cares about your workout routine?

Don’t post about veganism, polyamory, atheism, or any other voluntary non-mainstream lifestyle or identity. You’re obviously just trying to convert people and that’s so much worse than people telling you that you shouldn’t be poly/atheist/vegan.

Don’t post about race. Why do you have to make everything about race?

Don’t post about sexual orientation. Why do you people always have to shove your homosexuality in our faces?

Don’t opt out of social media. After reading all these rules, you might be thinking to yourself, “Wow, social media sounds like a lot of hard work. Also, no matter what I post, I’m shallow and vain and who even cares, right? Maybe I just shouldn’t have any social media accounts.” Not so fast! Opting out of social media means that you’re antisocial, boring, and holier-than-thou. You probably think you’re so much better than the rest of us vain and shallow narcissists. How rude. Do you even have any friends?

Do post about how social media is for vain, shallow narcissists who can’t think critically or engage with the offline world. As a fun thought experiment, see how many current social issues you can blame on social media. And definitely post this article on social media. No, of course I didn’t write it just for the clicks. What are you talking about?

The term “Nice Guy” was, at one point, a very useful term when it comes to discussing sexist dating dynamics. A Nice Guy is someone who has a crush on a female friend and believes that his friendship and his (superficially) good treatment of her entitles him to sex/romance.

If his crush rejects him, he often becomes bitter or angry and claims that he’s a “nice guy” unlike those other jerks she chooses to date and he’s done so much for her and so on and so forth.

Nice Guys may genuinely have been interested in friendship with the women they’re into, or the entire friendship may have been a ruse to try to manipulate her into a sexual/romantic relationship. What they all have in common is that they believe that if they’re nice enough to someone, then that person “ought” to reciprocate their interest.

(Obligatory “yes, this can happen between folks of any genders”; however, the term was coined to talk about what is arguably the most common version of it and that’s in a heterosexual context where the guy is the one acting entitled. While people of all genders and orientations may believe that being nice to someone entitles them to sex/romance, and while this is harmful no matter what, it seems to do the most harm when it’s got the combined forces of male privilege and heteronormativity behind it.)

So, “Nice Guy” is an important concept because it allows us to describe and discuss gendered patterns that might otherwise remain invisible. “Nice Guy” is how so many women end up in relationships they didn’t really want to be in, but felt obligated to at least try out. (Of course, pressure to start a relationship often turns into pressure to stay in the relationship.) It’s also how many women’s fear of rejecting men gets reinforced. Even if the Nice Guy never turns physically violent, his guilt-tripping and verbal coercion is scary and unpleasant enough for many women, and they learn to be very careful about letting men down easy. Sometimes, though, he becomes physically violent too.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure if the concept is still as useful as it originally was, because its meaning has become diluted to the point of uselessness.

An academic I follow on Twitter recently quoted this tweet with a (presumably sarcastic) comment about how if it’s true that “consent is never implied,” then they and their partner have been raping each other for years.

(I have no desire to individually call out this particular person or get into an argument about them and their specific views, so I’m not naming them. It’s irrelevant. Many people believe this.)

I was disturbed by this even though it’s not a new opinion to me, nor a new type of response, that flippant “well I guess I’m a rapist then, lol!” as if it’s something to joke about. That still makes me sad every time.

I’ve noticed a tendency to conflate a lot of concepts in this discussion. “Active” isn’t the same thing as “verbal,” and “passive” isn’t the same thing as “nonverbal.” “Implied” isn’t the same thing as “nonverbal,” either. Consent cannot be “implied,” but it can be indicated nonverbally. I would know, because that’s how it works in most of my established relationships.

Frivolous Fridays are the Orbit bloggers’ excuse to post about fun things we care a lot about that may not necessarily have serious implications for politics or social justice. Although any day is a good day to write about our passions outside of social issues, we sometimes have a hard time giving ourselves permission to do that. This is our way of encouraging each other to take a break from serious topics and have some fun.

Last New Year’s, my parents gave me an ice cream machine as a gift. Ever since, I have been an unstoppable force of dessert creation. There’s almost always some in my freezer, because even though I love ice cream, I love it in pretty small amounts. The fact that there is usually so much of it in my freezer is a fact that few people other than my roommate have known…until now.

Ice cream making sounds like kind of a complicated process, and it is–but it’s easy. The first step is to obtain an ice cream machine. Mine is one of the (relatively) cheaper ones and it works just fine unless you want to make massive quantities of ice cream. All an ice cream machine does is churn the ice cream base while also freezing it so that it’s neither a solid hunk of ice nor a liquidy mess.

Making ice cream usually consists of four steps:

Combining the ingredients (this often involves simmering a bunch of dairy products and adding stuff to them)

Freezing the ice cream (like, in the freezer) for at least a few hours

I haven’t started creating my own recipes yet, so I just basically do what the recipe says. 😛

When it comes to chilling the ice cream base, you can either put it in a sealed container and put that in the fridge for about four hours. Or, if you’re impatient like me, you can fill a big bowl with ice and cold water, pour the base into a gallon-size ziploc bag, seal it, and let it hang out in the bowl for a while until it’s pretty cold. The ziploc bag also makes for a pretty convenient way to pour the mixture into the ice cream machine.

Another smart thing to do is to make sure that when you put the churned ice cream into the freezer to finish freezing, you cover it with parchment paper first. I usually pour the churned ice cream into a tupperware, press the parchment paper onto the surface of the ice cream, and then close the container. The paper prevents those awful ice crystals of doom that have ruined every container of Ben & Jerry’s I’ve ever had.

I got to break out my ice cream machine for the first time a few days after I got it, at New Year’s Eve. I was throwing my first-ever NYE party, Russian-style. (The art of the Russian dinner party is definitely a topic for another Frivolous Friday post.) I decided that rather than normal champagne, I wanted champagne sorbet floats, because why the fuck not.

Let’s talk about one penis policies, which is when a nonmonogamous couple–generally a straight man and a queer woman–create a rule stating that the woman can only have sex with other women. (In a less extreme but probably harder-to-enforce version, the woman can have casual sex with other men, but she can only fall in love with or form committed relationships with women.)

One penis policies are generally justified using some combination of these rhetorical moves:

“Well it works for us so you can’t judge it”

“It’s equal because both of us are only seeing women”

“I [the man] can’t emotionally handle her fucking another man so isn’t this better than just being monogamous”

“I [the man] wanted to give her the opportunity to explore her interest in other women; she doesn’t need another man”

“I [the woman] am not interested in any other men anyway so what’s the problem”

I’m going to suggest another justification for one penis policies, one that tends to underlie the rest. This one usually remains invisible because nobody wants to say it out loud and sometimes they don’t even realize it’s what they believe: